Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

THE NATURE OF MORALITY AND ITS BEARING ON THE WAR (Notes of Two Lectures delivered in Cardiff 8th and 9th November, 1915). By SIR HENRY JONES, LLD., FBA I WANT to speak not so much about the War as about some fundamental problems that are raised by the war, and these, I think, are apt, in the long run, to be ethical problems, problems of value to human life. It is the value of scientific inquiry for human life which is at the root of all scientific effort and research. In every sphere it is the conception of value which is the determining element, the driving force. And this enquiry is, in its nature, philosophical. For I think that where there is an attempt at the thorough under- standing of anything, there Philosophy is. Now to try really to understand anything is to try to dis- cover its relation to its context its place in a system. So to understand the meaning of this war is in the last resort to attempt to put it in its place in a rational system. But this war is such an enormity of un- reason that it seems impossible to fit it in anywhere. That is why we are driven by this war to ask the most fundamental questions. Is there a God ? Does He rule the world ? Is there order in human history ? Is there progress ? Or, is it all a meaningless, tragic round, like the beating of the waves of a stormy sea ? Well, I want to ask some more questions like that, because, moral problems are themselves ultimate questions. They differ in this from the problems of natural science: for natural science, as such, raises no ultimate questions. As long as you work along the line of natural cause and effect in the way that science does, you always trace an effect to its antecedent cause. Im- mediately you arrive at this cause it becomes in your mind an effect, and you want to account for it by discovering its antecedent cause, and thus you are driven back and back in your enquiries, and in the end you reach nothing final. There is nothing in the whole realm of natural science that can be called a causa sui. So science does not give you an ulti- mate explanation it rests on hypothesis which it does not pretend to explain. But there is this distinction between moral phenomena and natural phenomena, whenever you touch a moral fact you touch what is in itself ultimate. What does it mean-say that something is morally good ? It means that it is good in itself. Anything else except moral good may be good as a means for something else, but morality is never a means to anything. When you are told to behave yourselves in order to avoid hell, it is not moral advice it is very good prudent policy, but it is not moral. The moral act is to do what is right because it is right, for the character of everything moral is that its value lies absolutely in itself. It is right, it is good, in itself, irrespective of all ante- cedents and irrespective of all consequences. Though heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law." One of the most colossal things about our civilisa- tion is its ignorance of the nature of moral values. I think a great part of the tragedy of the present day is due to the fact that the civilised nations of the world have turned their attention to everything but the greatest thing in the world, the nature of the moral fact and the moulding power over circumstances that lies in human character. I know, after an almost lifelong study of the questions of moral character, that we have not learnt the alphabet of it. We are dealing all our lives with questions of character from a wrong point of view. We are using fixed categories and fixed points of view to explain facts that are not static at all but dynamic. If you want to measure the value of a man morally, measure him by the movement he is making, and not by his attainments, not by where he is, but by the amount of way he is making. What difficulties is he over- coming and what old self is he leaving behind? It is not fixity that counts, but movement. How does that movement take place ? Because human character constantly picks up its past and carries it with it as an element in its present. What you did yesterday lives in you now. The past is not past, it is fitted into the present in the form of propensities and habits. That is why antecedents and circumstances, heredity and environment, are but the raw material of character. Character is always creating itself anew. The past does not rule it, because the past is constantly made subordinate in its present, just as we digest our food, converting what we eat into an element in our physical systems and changing both the food and the system in the process. Life, especially moral life, is a constant new creation, a being born again. Man is making character every moment by his action in the circum- stances in which he finds himself. Now, the war is a moral fact. Undoubtedly, it is a moral breakdown that is its cause. The world